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DECOMPOSITION

DECOMPOSITION

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9844510-0-5

Pub Date: Spring 2010

Pages: 128


Renee Roehl and Kelly Chadwick, editors


FROM THE INTRODUCTION

. . . Poems, like mushrooms, demand our close attention before they can be found or seen at all. As mushrooms are a hybrid kingdom—first thought to be plants, now believed closer to animals, but truly neither, a life form in fact uniquely their own—so it is with poems, which reside hybrid between music and speech, between logic and feeling, between waking thought and the leapings of dream, doing work they alone can. And then, as the largest living creature on earth (described in Laura Kasischke's poem) is a fungal mat whose expressed DNA extends over many square miles in Oregon's eastern forests, so poetry's mostly unseen devices underlie, sustain, and connect over vast distances other dimensions of language, whether lullaby, sermon, or political address at both its best and its worst. As mushrooms hold dangerous powers, so do poems—Plato famously banned poets from his ideal Republic because their words can sway in ways beyond reason's reach. Both mushrooms and poems hold shamanic potential; when taken inside us fully, they have the power to alter consciousness in profoundly unpredictable ways.


Neither porcini nor poems are day to day staples: continuous availability is confined to the more easily grown, more easily storable grains. Yet the intensities of the rare, the seasonal, the brief, the strange, and that which requires both a kneeling intimacy and depth of knowledge to be safely known at all—these are needed as much as oatmeal, rice, or bread. It is that elusive, concentrated presence, the sudden coming and going of life forms mostly hidden, the awareness of mysteries that can only be given, not forced into being, that both the mushrooms and the poems in this volume point toward. Gathered from the root-zones of many different trees, knife-scraped from rock-face, lifted from dung, spore-flung into air, these gathered mushroom poems offer undomestic, distinctive discoveries to all who choose to join the effort to find them.

—Jane Hirshfield


    Anthologies of poetry are created to chronicle a movement or to gather poems on a single subject or theme. There are poetry anthologies on war, love, death, food, and a host of special topics. With the publication of Decomposition, we now have a superb collection of poems that derive from the perception that the fungi have much to teach us about the surrounding universe and life itself. Fungi-inspired poems—is this so unusual? Poems celebrating flowers, trees, and gardens have informed literary traditions since Ovid and Chuang Tzu, for nature themes are universal in poetry the world over. We frequently find poems tucked away in mushroom club newsletters, primarily because mycophiles tend to open their lives to the devotion of fungi in every conceivable fashion. But the realization that mushroom-inspired poetry is itself a singular tradition, one that has largely proliferated underground or at the margins of literature, has had to await Roehl and Chadwick’s splendid collection of mushroom poems that have sporulated and fruited in a vivid wordscape of color and form.

    —David Rose

    Sherman Alexie  •  A.R. Ammons   •  Margaret Atwood  •  David Axelrod  •  John Bargowski  •  Marvin Bell  •  Simeon Berry  •  Elizabeth Bishop  •  Robert Bly   •  Todd Boss  •  John Cage   •  Jim Daniels  •  Alison Hawthorne Deming  •  Xue Di  •  Adam Dickinson  •  Emily Dickinson  •  David Dodd Lee  •  Alan Dugan  •  Donna J. Gelagotis Lee  •  Harry Gilonis  •  Mark Halperin  •  Robert Hass  •  William Heyen  •  Christopher Howell  •  Andrew Hudgins  •  Charlotte Innes  •  Louis Jenkins  •  Laura Kasischke  •  Basma Kavanagh  •  Christine Boyka Kluge  •  Yusef Komunyakaa  •  Ted Kooser  •  Maxine Kumin  •  Ann Lauinger  •  Dorianne Laux  •  D.H. Lawrence  •  Jeff Mann  •  David Mason  •  W.S. Merwin  •  Mary Oliver  •  Allan Peterson  •  Sylvia Plath  •  Robert Michael Pyle  •  Alberto Rios  •  Pattiann Rogers  •  Michael J. Rosen  •  Kay Ryan  •  Tomaz Salamun   •  Lynne Shapiro  •  R.T. Smith  •  Gary Snyder  •  William Stafford  •  Gerald Stern  •  Arthur Sze  •  Lee Upton  •  Sidney Wade  •  Robert Penn Warren  •  Michael Water  •  Richard Wilbur  •  Nance Van Winckel  •  Jane Whitledge  •  Robert Wrigley  •  W. B. Yeats  •  David Young  •  Gary Young

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